Table 1.
Possible signs and symptoms of some cognitive impairments, detectable with the preliminary Neuropsychological Examination (NPE).
Cognitive domain | Neuropsychological disorder | Signs and symptoms | |
---|---|---|---|
Attention | Selective attention impairments | Internal and external distractibility, attentive captures. | |
Vigilance-sustained attention impairments | Drowsiness, attentive fluctuations. | ||
Memory | Anterograde amnesia | Oblivion of recent information, perseveration in discourse. | |
Retrograde amnesia | Oblivion of past information on recalling autobiographical data, job information, and the medical history. | ||
Pre-frontal functions | Dysexecutive disorders | Poor or diminished insight, lack of the theme of discourse, perseveration of speech or action components, simplified or confused mental tracking or reasoning. | |
Adynamic syndrome | Reduction of verbal or behavioral initiative, mutism, lack of spontaneity, diminished empathy. | ||
Dysinhibited behavior | Iperorality, jocularity, social inappropriateness, hyperactivity, diminished emotional control. | ||
Speech and language | Aphasia | Dysfluency | Effortful articulation, speech lacking of normal prosodic variations, reduced speech output. |
Phonemic deficit | Phonemic paraphasia, conduites d'approche. | ||
Syntactic deficit | Simplified syntactic clauses, telegraphic speech output, omission/substitution morphological endings. | ||
Lexical-semantic deficit | Word-finding problems, circumlocutions, semantic paraphasia. | ||
Comprehension deficit | Answers are inconsistent with questions, necessity to repeat a same question in absence of hearing loss. | ||
Visuospatial abilities | Topographical disorientation | Impaired orientation in hospital unit. | |
Neglect | Motor | Patient does not utilize a limb, which adopts a passive, anomalous posture. | |
Personal | Lateralized dressing apraxia: e.g., arm of patient's glasses are misplaced upon one of his ears. | ||
Extrapersonal | Head and eyes exploration movements are limited, shortened or defective toward a region of space, patient does not answer questions when prompted from a side of his space. | ||
Other cognitive functions | Optic ataxia | Misreaching errors trying to grasp objects on the table. | |
Gaze apraxia | Abnormal eye and head movements during attempted changes in gaze, fixed gaze, etc. | ||
Alien hand syndrome | Anomalous posture of arms, levitation, intermanual conflict. | ||
Ambient dependence syndrome | Echopraxis, echolalia, imitation behavior, utilization behavior. | ||
Frontal memory disorders | Confabulations, interference, errors concerning the source of the memories. |